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Tories wield huge trade deal to ward off Senate scandal: Tim Harper

Two days into the new session, its back to Ottawa through the looking glass, where not all is what it appears to be.

Instead of joining the first question period of the new session Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and International Trade Minister Ed Fast were boarding a plane for Brussels. (Adrian Wyld / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

“You won’t believe what the press gallery just did in Ottawa,” wrote Fred DeLorey, the Conservatives’ director of political operations.

But we could certainly believe what the Conservatives were doing. It was only a couple of weeks ago that the Conservatives used a decision by their own Health Canada bureaucrats as a fundraising wedge, joining big telecommunications and banks as straw men on whose back they tried to raise funds.

The media crime was not transmitting Harper’s words (his office tweeted them anyway), but given the opportunity for all the air time he wanted Thursday, Harper was instead bundled on a plane for Brussels, missing the first question period of the new session.

This left Opposition leader Tom Mulcair all corsage, no prom date. After a month of faux question periods via Twitter, Mulcair was left looking at an empty seat across the aisle Thursday and will have to watch from afar as Harper promotes his European Union trade jewel from Brussels Friday.

Mulcair, however, knows how to play the looking glass game, painting the prime minister as a felon on the lam.

Harper, he said, is on Con Air and “gone into hiding on the other side of the Atlantic.’’

There is no denying this trade deal is a coup for Harper, being touted, sight unseen, as a pact that will create 80,000 jobs, add an average $1,000 in Canadian household income and pour $12 billion per year into the Canadian economy.

It rendered the throne speech largely illusory Wednesday. It became a way to pass an early autumn evening while the prime minister’s plane was being gassed up.

How else to explain a pledge to enshrine balanced budgets in “normal economic times,’’ contained in a speech entitled, “Prosperity and Opportunity in an Uncertain World,’’ by a government that has always told us that economic chaos was lapping at our shores.

The undefined “normal economic times” gives this pledge the consistency of play dough.

How else to explain Industry Minister James Moore, on his weekend television blitz to telegraph the throne speech contents, talking about the frustration of someone rising “at 6 in the morning, (who) drives to the airport, parks their car, pays the fees, goes through the gauntlet of security, goes to the gate, gets there and the airline has sold 175 tickets for 165-seat plane and people get bumped to a flight a few hours later or the next day and they miss a wedding or they miss a funeral, or they miss a job opportunity. That can’t happen anymore and we’re going to move to protect consumers.’’

When New Democrats asked what happened to the pledge to help airline passengers, Transport Minister Lisa Raitt went all Jabberwocky, scolding them about “speculating’’ about the speech’s contents. Perhaps Moore was merely venting.

The government has been curiously quiet in promoting the benefits of this trade deal, the largest since NAFTA, perhaps out of fear that it would never come together.

The details will be unveiled Friday morning, but expect Conservatives to now shout the benefits from the mountains, because this is a political victory that they will not only take to the voters in 2015 but which they believe will truly move them beyond the Senate spending scandal.

And if that doesn’t work, Conservatives in the Senate signalled another tack Thursday.

They want to suspend Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau without pay. More simply put, in a move that Alice would have understood, they want to make them disappear.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter;@nutgraf1

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